The Pacific Radiation Bowl

Jan. 22, 2018: For years, Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus have been flying balloons to the stratosphere to monitor cosmic rays penetrating Earth’s atmosphere. Lately, we’ve been flying the same payloads onboard airplanes. We want to map Earth’s radiation environment at aviation altitudes where millions of people are routinely exposed to elevated levels of cosmic rays.

Recently we encountered an interesting feature in data taken over the Pacific Ocean: a “radiation bowl.” On Nov. 30th, 2017, Hervey Allen, a computer scientist at the University of Oregon, carried our radiation sensors onboard a commercial flight from San Francisco, California, to Auckland, New Zealand: map. As his plane cruised at a nearly constant altitude (35,000 ft) across the equator, radiation levels gracefully dipped, then recovered, in a bowl-shaped pattern:

In one way, this beautiful curve is no surprise. We expect dose rates to reach a low point near the equator, because that is where Earth’s magnetic field provides the greatest shielding against cosmic rays. Interestingly, however, the low point is not directly above the equator. A parabolic curve fit to the data shows that the actual minimum occurred at 5.5 degrees N latitude.

Is Earth’s “radiation equator” offset from the geographic equator? Very likely it is. Earth’s magnetic field is tilted with respect to Earth’s spin axis and, moreover, there are many inhomogeneities in our planetary magnetic field that may create radiation zones of interest in unexpected places.

We are now planning additional trips across the equator to map the band of least radiation girdling our planet. In fact, we are working on a dataset now that includes an equator-crossing between the USA and Chile. Stay tuned for updates.